An equipment maker with a dealer network has a knowledge problem in both directions. The dealers' technicians service more machines than the OEM's own, and they develop fixes for nuisance faults the OEM has never documented. The OEM has revision-specific manuals and bulletins that reach dealers late, if at all. Neither side can see the other's knowledge, and both are careful about what they share.
What dealers want
The OEM's checklist for an alarm they have never seen, right now, without a phone queue. Current part numbers, not the ones in the manual they were sent two years ago. Warranty claims that go through because the diagnosis is documented in the form the OEM wants.
What OEMs want
To know what is actually happening in the field: which symptoms escalate, which dealers have high second-visit rates, where the manual is thin — without reading every dealer's work orders, which dealers would not allow anyway. And to keep dealer field fixes from becoming "the OEM said" when they did not.
Scope as the design
Field Triage gives each dealer a workspace scoped to its licensed product lines. Inside it: the OEM's indexed knowledge, current; the dealer's own work orders; and the dealer's own approved notes, labelled as the dealer's and confined to that workspace. The OEM sees aggregate reporting — cases, escalations, second visits by dealer and model — but not the dealers' work-order text unless shared.
A dealer note can be promoted to an OEM bulletin only through the OEM's approval. Until then it is clearly a dealer's practice, cited as such.
Warranty
The work-order summary generated from each session carries the diagnostic steps with manual references and the evidence attached, in the OEM's required format. Dealers like this for an unglamorous reason: claims stop bouncing.
Billing
Dealer workspaces can sit under the OEM's plan or pay directly. Either way the usage ledger is per workspace, which is what both sides' finance teams ask about first.